How to design the best eCommerce landing pages

Let’s just take a short moment to visualise a scenario. Imagine yourself walking down a street filled with shops and stores. You aim to have a simple window-shopping session, but something starts catching your attention. There must be something in particular that made you want to enter and potentially buy from that store.

With this in mind, think about the physical store as an eCommerce website. In the digital eCommerce world, you are more likely to purchase from a visually appealing website, where you can clearly and quickly see the company’s services, right?

This is all about how your eCommerce landing page is built, designed and delivered to your viewers. Research states that most sales losses are due to customers arriving at the wrong place on your website, which makes them leave after not finding anything of interest to them.

Why is it essential to have healthy eCommerce landing pages?

According to HubSpot, the average conversion rate for a website is between 1% and 3%, whilst landing pages can get a conversion rate for total traffic between 5% and 15%. Can you see now why creating landing pages that fit your business should be on the top of your to-do-list?

Also, it appears that the most frequent complaints of online visitors are the absence of services and precise answers to their queries. This makes it very difficult for them to find the right product information or even understand your promotions’ conditions.

Landing pages are created and used for eCommerce websites to speed up the visitor’s buying process, the reason why a landing page design is crucial. It aims to direct potential customers down a comfortable and attractive road where they can find all the information they are looking for, so they will take the actions you are aiming for.

Examples of the most popular and intuitive eCommerce website CTA’s (call-to-action) are:

A subscription form
A purchase button
Create an account / Sign up for free
Try it free button (to trial a specific product/service)

After all, eCommerce landing pages are incredibly efficient in creating promotional campaigns that deliver results. Essentially, they will be the pages shown to visitors when they follow a link from an advertisement or an email. Using landing pages for eCommerce websites also reduces the website’s bounce rate, as those pages are specifically designed to answer questions and clear up visitor’s doubts.

Hint: High-quality content on landing pages will significantly help your website to get on Google’s right side! This means that the more quality content you have on the landing pages, the greater your overall quality score. Even better? Your cost per click (CPC) will also decrease, making your campaigns less costly.

Content marketing is a significant aspect of digital marketing in general, so head over to our beginner’s guide to content marketing to make sure you start your landing pages content on the right foot!

Important fact: A home page is not the ideal landing page

By now, you may already know that the ideal landing page is not the same in all eCommerce stores or for all products and services. Imagine this: you click on a Google Ad link (or email), and you end up on a website homepage (or a section) with not enough information. Your predictable reaction would be to get angry and maybe even leave the website in a heartbeat.

eCommerce Landing Pages vs Product Pages

Before diving into how you can create the best eCommerce landing page for your website, it’s essential to know that these pages differ entirely from the other pages on your eCommerce website. If you get this aspect right, you will see a positive impact on your overall conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Most times, when people visit your website, they will land on the homepage or a product page. These pages don’t instigate action, but they are fantastic to introduce your potential customers to your brand and products. Did you know that visitors who land on a product page are more likely to bounce than those who land on a landing page?

This is simply because landing pages are designed and optimised with a simple goal in mind: to increase your conversion rate. Product pages are aiming to inform people, whilst landing pages are to convert them. Easy-peasy, right?

eCommerce Landing Pages

Landing pages contain only one clear call-to-action (CTA), and they have a minimum amount of additional pathways (site navigation). The content is also written whilst following a clear goal, aimed at specific targeted audiences, and they are fully optimised for marketing campaigns, not necessarily focusing so much on SEO. They also include detailed product descriptions written for specific targeted audiences as well.

In case you’ve missed it, we have a great article about how to build your perfect target persona and even a free downloadable target persona template that you can use.

Product Pages

Product pages contain a clear call-to-action (CTA), but they can include multiple CTA’s. They feature additional pathways, like site navigation and product categories. The content is generally written for the masses without having a specific targeted audience in mind, and they include product descriptions and recommendations.

This type of page also focuses on SEO optimisation, compared to landing pages, to attract more organic traffic to a website.

5 steps to create the best eCommerce landing page

To make it clear, straight from the beginning, there isn’t a “strict formula” to follow when creating a useful landing page for eCommerce sites. However, there are some eCommerce landing page best practices that we’d like to share with you.

Generally speaking, when thinking about creating high converting eCommerce landing pages, you should pay closer attention to:

The aim of the landing page
The product niche and sector
The tone of the message
The audience
Brand perception
All the necessary support resources

A recognisable brand style

Having the exact style on both your website and marketing materials isn’t necessary, however, it is essential to have coherence on both sides. This means that you should aim for a smooth visual transition between your ads, emails and newsletters, and your eCommerce landing page (the page where the user ends up).

You should have the same colours, fonts, types of images and general tone of voice so that the user knows exactly who you are and what your message is. Try to limit the clutter, as an excellent eCommerce landing page is straightforward and very easy to follow.

Simple design & structure

Research states that most eCommerce websites lose a considerable amount of conversions simply because people are too overwhelmed by the high amount of text or getting lost trying to find the ‘Buy Now’ button (or the call to action).

To avoid cluttering your landing pages, you should:

Write straight-to-the-point headlines
Remove the navigation links
Include bullet points for product details

It’s important to remember that it takes only a few seconds for a website visitor to decide the length of time that they want to spend on your website or if they will bounce straight away.

Landing pages are most likely to be skimmed by their visitors, so make sure to have all your elements on it with a clear purpose so that people can find what they are looking for. You can do so by giving users benefits through positive language that calls for them to take action. The solution is a short text, but it contains vital information on the spot!

When it comes to the navigation of the landing page, you should aim for simplicity whilst adding just a few elements like:

Title and Subtitle
Descriptive text for your products
Images and videos
Testimonials, logos, and anything that could strengthen your page’s authority
A quality seal to instil trust in your website’s security

What does that mean? That you can remove the traditional website navigation elements such as menus, categories, drop-down boxes, etc. This will stop distracting your user’s experience whilst focusing on the campaign’s main aspects.

Make sure to include:

Secure payments
Technical support
Contact information
Awards
Join efforts with other brands (if there are any)

One clear and visible call-to-action

As soon as visitors land on your page, they should know your offering and how they can access and benefit from it.

But remember that a high converting landing page should only have one CTA! This, in turn, will make their decision a lot easier, instead of them having to analyse and choose between various options. By doing so, your visitors will advance a lot faster into the sales funnel without distractions, which is ideal for your conversion rate!

Your CTA must be placed prominently and in an easy-to-access way whilst being targeted for your specific audience. You could:

Place your CTA at the top of the page
Include multiple buttons for the same CTA throughout the same landing page
Use an active voice when writing the button text (“Sign-Up For Free)
Create a sense of urgency (“Claim It Now”)

Accelerator

Do some testing with your CTAs! Even the smallest changes can make a big difference, so try to play with your button text, colour, and placement to see what works best.

Use high-quality images

Think about it this way – you have a concise amount of time to convince your potential customers once they land on your page, and here is where images matter!

Try to use high-quality images that will fit with your page’s overall objective, but make sure to optimise them for all devices. Try to pay a little more attention to mobile design, as it is becoming more and more popular for eCommerce transactions. This means that your product images must fit accurately on any phone display so that visitors won’t need to zoom in and out or to scroll down.

The images you will put in your promotional materials must include all the products listed in your catalogues. If those specific products can’t be found later on your landing page (or the rest of the website), people will feel frustrated and confused, which can seriously affect your conversion rate.

Add additional resources

An eCommerce landing page goes way beyond a simple form and a button. You should include the advantages and benefits your viewers can gain by purchasing what you have to offer. What tends to work very well are guides, free demos, videos, and all sorts of personalised consultations, so make sure to test these out!

If you include any of those resource types on your landing pages and think to attach them to a form, make it more straightforward to fill out than in other specific parts of your eCommerce website.

If you want to have a process that involves several steps that start on your landing page, try to include a prior summary of the steps that people must take to simplify their buying journey. This will let users know how long the purchase process or query will take, putting their minds to ease.

For a little bit of inspiration, head over to HubSpot’s blog on 13 great landing page examples you’ll want to copy in 2021.

Creating eCommerce landing pages for your campaigns will make your content much more specific whilst improving your traffic and conversion quality. Note that landing pages work in continuous progress because they are very short-lived resources that you will need to adapt to each new campaign and target audience. We have more tips and tricks on designing a landing page that converts and on the 5 best practices that you need to know about landing page copy that we think you could learn a great deal from!

To conclude, we have one more important tip for you in creating eCommerce landing pages. Analysing your landing page performance will allow you to check the effectiveness of the links and CTAs that you’ve placed on your page, as well as that of the channels on which your linked ads are shown.

If you have more questions on creating your ideal eCommerce landing page, why not book a FREE website landing page consultation with us, and a member of our friendly team will be happy to assist you with their best advice! In case you are interested in levelling up your overall eCommerce digital marketing strategy, you can also book a FREE eCommerce digital marketing consultation, and together, we can find the best solutions for your business.